This API is awkward, inefficient, incoherent, and unintuitive. The bug
fix for which it was originally added was abandoned in favour of a
different approach, so it was never used. It appears that no consumers
are currently calling it. It would be best if none started.
Add a deprecation warning to discourage its use and allow us to remove
it altogether at some point in the future.
Change-Id: I9559c7051024019fac957385faced645920b815c